An intensive firsthand exploration of modern Egyptian liberation and solidarity.
Impassioned coverage from the front lines of a historic Middle Eastern uprising.
New Yorker staff writer Steavenson (The Weight of a Mustard Seed: The Intimate Story of an Iraqi General and His Family During Thirty Years of Tyranny, 2009) reported from Cairo during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution amid President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation, and she diligently charts her thoughts and experiences in this series of biographical sketches and observances. Arriving in Cairo a day after Egypt’s Day of Rage, the author became immediately immersed in the highly volatile landscape as friendly yet scrutinizing armed citizen committees patrolled Tahrir Square while tanks and militia in riot gear ascended the Corniche El-Nile. Steavenson came to appreciate and become enthralled by this prideful population eager to commit their newfound freedom to video and social media. Traversing an “awkward mix of military with civilians,” she encountered an emboldened Egyptian counterculture, and she brings their stories to vibrant life. Among them were a prominent, politically active gynecologist upon whose panoramic balcony Steavenson met a colorful host of budding radicals; proprietors of a century-old, family-owned bakery; a young translator who accompanied the author to sprawling midnight sit-ins; a sensitive, street-wise taxi driver; and a cutthroat lieutenant colonel with Egyptian military intelligence. Collectively, their stories illustrate the rich Egyptian cultural tapestry of a triumphant people, even as a new president rose to power and violence erupted on Steavenson’s final day in Cairo. The author’s anecdotes and reflections are complemented by photographs of ubiquitous graffiti found throughout Tahrir Square, which formed an artistic voice of the people, creatively exemplifying their defiance and revolutionary fervor. Though her own personal narration bears weight to the experience, Steavenson allows the reformists she encountered to speak for themselves as they strived for social justice: “I would need to be a novelist,” she writes, “to write a better truth than these glimpses offer.”
An intensive firsthand exploration of modern Egyptian liberation and solidarity.Pub Date: July 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237525-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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